Statistics 

• Name: Mike Rosser
• Location: Wanaaring, New South Wales
• Farming enterprise: Cattle
• Landholder Size: 70,000Ha
• NaturePlus™ Project Area: 5,364Ha.
• NaturePlus™ Project ID: 1: Argyle NaturePlus™ Native  Vegetation Restoration Project.

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GreenCollar has also publicly released the NaturePlus™ Standard, Guide and Claims Guidance. Together, this suite of documents provide the rules for how projects work and how credits can be generated for measured, verified conservation outcomes. GreenCollar has designed the NaturePlus™ Scheme to open opportunities for projects around the world to be developed and drive private investment into meaningful biodiversity improvement and outcomes for nature.   

The announcement about the first credits has been accompanied by the release of two independent expert reports by climate change investment and advisory firm, Pollination. The State of voluntary biodiversity credit markets: A global review of biodiversity credit schemes report provides an overview of the rapidly emerging global landscape of voluntary biodiversity credit schemes and assesses eight existing and emerging schemes against key integrity, governance and technical frameworks.  

The Global Review focuses, in particular, on how to ensure highest integrity outcomes and results are achieved for people and nature.  

The other report, Voluntary Biodiversity Credit Scheme Review: the NaturePlus Scheme, found that a number of features distinguish the NaturePlus™ Scheme from the majority of the other reviewed schemes, including the potential for the scheme to be applied in all ecosystem types. The report also found the NaturePlus™ Scheme to be well positioned against all of the reviewed schemes in relation to governance and scheme design indicators.

“GreenCollar commissioned Pollination to undertake an independent review of the NaturePlus™ Scheme and to compare it to other leading biodiversity credit schemes developing internationally. We wanted to make sure that we had built the Standard to deliver high integrity outcomes for nature. It is critical to us that project participants and buyers have confidence that the projects are contributing to positive outcomes for nature,” said GreenCollar’s General Manager of New Initiatives, Anjali Nelson.

“NaturePlus™ Credits have not been designed for use in any existing compliance market and are not biodiversity offsets. NaturePlus™ Credits are being generated by land (and hopefully in the future, sea) managers who are committed to doing the work required to deliver real outcomes for nature, including measuring and understanding how their management is improving the environmental condition. Data is collected across multiple indicators and compiled into independently verified and audited accounts. NaturePlus™ is designed to incentivise these resource managers to continue to adapt management to restore and protect biodiversity over the long term.”  

Pollination Director and report lead author, Laura Waterford, said the analysis carried out for the Global Review, was important given rapidly increasing interest from the private sector about how it can understand and invest in biodiversity regeneration and stewardship.  

“Globally, there is increasing pressure on businesses to disclose their nature-related risks and therefore to demonstrate a commitment to mitigating those risks by reducing their impacts on nature and investing in the regeneration and stewardship of nature. Growing demand from the business community for solutions and projects to invest in to support positive biodiversity claims, including via voluntary biodiversity credit markets, is therefore driving the need to understand the strengths and differences between the various voluntary biodiversity credit schemes and products that are coming online as the ‘supply side’ of the market grows and the business case for investment builds.”  

Each NaturePlus™ Credit represents habitat or species restoration or conservation outcomes achieved over one hectare. NaturePlus™ projects are registered with the Accounting for Nature® Framework which sets the overarching standard for measuring the trend in ecological health for different environmental assets (e.g. agricultural soils, native vegetation, fauna) in a cost-effective, scientifically robust, fully transparent and verifiable way.

The NaturePlus™ Scheme has been designed to incentivise restoration of degraded landscapes, as well as to reward ongoing stewardship of intact ecosystems. It is progressing towards third party administration of the NaturePlus™ Standard and is accompanied by claims guidance to ensure claims made around investment in the scheme are honest and accurate. The scheme has been explicitly designed to have application to any ecosystem, including marine areas, and allows for continuous crediting to support long term impact. The reports, plus detailed information about the NaturePlus™ Scheme, including the Standard, Guide, Claims Guidance and the projects can be found at the new NaturePlus™ website.

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The agreement – a new “global biodiversity framework” – containing various goals and targets, requires all nations to dramatically increase their efforts for protecting and restoring nature. The centrepiece is the “30 by 30” ambition, which commits governments “to ensure and enable” that, by 2030, at least 30 percent of land and sea is “effectively conserved and managed through ecologically representative, well-connected and equitably governed systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures”.

Significance

The agreement is extremely significant moment for conservation and our planet’s biodiversity (the myriad species with which we share our world) because, though not legally binding, it represents a goal. This goal will focus ambition, effort, action and assessment in a similar manner to the 1.5C goal in the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation and adaptation. In fact, many delegates at COP15 described it as a “Paris moment” for the world’s animal and plant life.

Being a global goal, it means that the world’s most biodiverse countries have committed to protecting areas seen as the “lungs of the planet” – the tropical forests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia. Thirty percent is a significant increase because, as The Guardian reports, only 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are currently protected globally, with Australia protecting 22 percent of its land areas and listing 17 percent of its waters as marine sanctuaries. 

The framework also reaffirms the rights of Indigenous peoples and ensures they have a voice in any decision-making. It explicitly recognises Indigenous Peoples’ rights, roles, territories, and knowledge.

Named the Kunming-Montreal pact, because COP15 has essentially been split into two parts in China and Canada, the full agreement consists of four goals and 23 targets ranging from increasing protected areas, to reducing pollution, to eliminating and mitigating the effects of invasive species. In combination, the targets mean counties have committed to “urgent management actions to halt human induced extinction of known threatened species” by 2030.

It responds to evidence that, despite ongoing efforts, biodiversity is deteriorating worldwide at rates unprecedented in human history. The vision of the framework is a world living in harmony with nature where: “By 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people.” 

The agreement in summary

Carbon Pulse summarises the pact’s goals and targets as being to:

• maintain, enhance, or restore the integrity, connectivity, and resilience of all ecosystems by 2050, substantially increasing the area of natural ecosystems by that year,
• protect at least 30 percent of terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine ecosystems by 2030, and ensure that loss of areas with high biodiversity importance is close to zero by 2030,
• take urgent action to ensure the end of human-induced species extinction by 2030,
• ensure safe trade of wild species and eliminate, minimise, or reduce the impacts of invasive species,
• reduce pollution risks from all sources,
• ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits that arise from the utilisation of genetic resources via the establishment of a multilateral fund, which will be finalised at COP16 in Turkey in 2024,
• ensure the full integration of biodiversity into policy-making processes,
• take measures to encourage and enable business to regularly report on their risks, dependencies, and impact on biodiversity,
• reduce incentives, including subsidies, that are harmful to biodiversity by at least $500 bln globally by 2030, and
• raise at least $200 bln per year from all sources including the private sector by 2030, and at least $20 bln per year by 2025 and $30 bln by 2030 from developed countries.

The agreement also commits governments to minimise the impact of climate change and foster positive impacts of climate action in relation to biodiversity. It also ensures that large and transnational companies and financial institutions regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity throughout their operations, supply and value chains and portfolios. It also imposes an obligation for national governments to monitor or report on a set of headline indicators at least every five years, which include the percentage of land and sea they have conserved, as well as the number of  national companies that published regular reports on their biodiversity impacts and dependencies.

Criticisms and shortcomings

Despite the never-before achieved level of international commitment and cooperation for the animals, plants and ecosystems of the world, the momentousness of the occasion has been tempered with caution from conservation, scientific and some government corners, particularly in relation to the absence of certain quantitative targets. The contention is that, without specific numbers to aim for, it is harder to assess and make countries accountable.

For example, Stuart Butchart, the chief scientist at BirdLife International was much quoted as saying that a commitment to significantly reduce extinction risk by 2030 was important and very welcome, “though we would have liked to have seen a quantitative target here as for other targets.” An Lambrechts, head of the Greenpeace delegation at COP15, agreed, adding that it was ”stripped-down, without essential qualifiers that exclude damaging activities from protected areas.”

The Australian delegation, led by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, pushed for many of the critical inclusions in the pact – including the 30 percent protection goal – but was unable to secure a global commitment that would reflect the domestic zero-extinctions policy it announced in October, which is shared by New Zealand and a number of European countries. 

Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy stated that, “Many of the world’s threatened species, including Australia’s, are on a pathway to go extinct well before 2050 …it is not acceptable for a framework on biodiversity to allow for extinctions to continue for another 28 years. Australia has a goal of no new extinctions – that’s a goal the world should have supported.”

Many have also pointed out that the agreement contains loopholes, weak language and timelines around actions that don’t adequately address the scale of the crisis.

Brendan Wintle, an expert in conservation ecology at the University of Melbourne, told The Age, “We have a general sense of positivity that the agreement signals an important shift in terms of government and business interest, but we still hold significant concerns about the pace of change.” 

The final text of the agreement also removed targets intended to halve business impacts on biodiversity, and limited disclosure of impacts from large and transnational companies.

Another common criticism is that there is little detail on the $30 bln which is to flow from developed countries to poorer countries – particularly given that disadvantaged nations were calling for the figure to be $100 bln – and that it is not legally binding.

Writing in The Conversation, a group of eminent scientists observed that,”…language on the ‘circular economy’, didn’t make it in, and explicit targets were removed from earlier drafts regarding the regulation of plastics and pollution, instead replaced with generic language of ‘prevent’ and ‘reduce’.”

So – what now?

However, regardless of the shortcomings, the fact that an agreement has been struck between such a large and unprecedented number of countries in relation to nature conservation is ground-breaking. It is widely considered to be a very positive starting point, despite the flaws identified by various parties. It is also generally viewed as a moment from which action can and must begin.

In this regard, on Twitter, EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, said, “I welcome the historic outcome of COP15. The world has agreed on unprecedented and measurable nature protection and restoration goals and on a Global Biodiversity Fund. And investing into nature also means fighting climate change.”

Marco Lambertini, Director General, WWF International provided perhaps one of the neatest summations: “The agreement represents a major milestone for the conservation of our natural world, and biodiversity has never been so high on the political and business agenda…Agreeing a shared global goal that will guide collective and immediate action to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 is an exceptional feat for those that have been negotiating the Global Biodiversity Framework, and a win for people and planet. It sends a clear signal and must be the launch pad for action from governments, business and society to transition towards a nature-positive world…”

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In other words, climate action has started to go mainstream in the business world. But releasing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere isn’t the only negative impact businesses have had – and reducing their carbon footprint isn’t the only way they can do good. Water quality, plastic waste, biodiversity and the health of natural ecosystems; these are all pressing environmental issues. And as with carbon emissions, corporations can play an important role in ensuring these challenges are properly addressed. 

Thankfully, businesses working to combat climate change don’t have to go it alone. A wide range of environmental market-based mechanisms are emerging to help meet (and even exceed) ESG goals, with carbon credits just one part of the solution.

In this article, we take a look at three new environmental markets that move beyond carbon. Each market focuses on a specific environmental issue, and provides a targeted, financially incentivised method to drive long-term behaviour change and put the environment on the balance sheet. 

Environmental markets that move beyond carbon.

Plastic Credits

For years, the production of disposable plastics has outstripped our ability to process them, making plastic pollution one of the most pressing environmental issues facing the planet. Technically, it’s solvable: people can use fewer plastics, we can recycle, and companies can reduce plastic waste from their value chains.

Unfortunately, zero plastic isn’t an overnight option for some industries yet. But that doesn’t mean they can’t take action. Enter Plastic Credits, an environmental market designed to help reduce plastic waste in the aggregate, while enabling those who can’t (yet) go without to take ownership of their plastic footprint and make a positive difference.

A single Plastic Credit is generated when a verified plastic waste producer is able to remove, reuse or recycle one tonne of plastic from the environment. Currently, GreenCollar is working with banana farmers in Far North Queensland to responsibly discard or recycle the single-use plastic covers they have traditionally used to protect banana bunches as they ripen. The more covers they remove and recycle, the more Plastic Credits they earn – and the more credits other companies can purchase to help meet their ESG goals. 

Reef Credits 

In 2019, the Great Barrier Reef’s long-term outlook was downgraded to “very poor” – and things haven’t improved much since. One of the causes is fine sediment and dissolved inorganic nitrogen flowing into the reef from farmland across Queensland. Despite farmers’ best efforts, changing land management practice can be an expensive business, which is exactly the problem the Reef Credits Scheme seeks to solve.

The first water quality market of its kind in the world, Reef Credits pay farmers and land managers to make changes in how they use and look after their land. These can be subtle, such as changing the way they apply fertiliser, or more intensive rehabilitation projects to restore gullies or establish wetlands that naturally filter sediment from runoff. Either way, they result in less pollutants reaching the Great Barrier Reef without impacting productivity of the land, creating local jobs, and netting farmers extra income for their efforts. 

Until last month, the Queensland Government was the largest buyer of Reef Credits. But Qantas has just committed $500,000 to purchase 20 per cent of all Reef Credits produced to date, paving the way for more businesses to invest in the health of the Great Barrier Reef. The bulk of the revenue made from the sale of Reef Credits goes straight to farmers, providing them with the additional income needed to make ongoing improvements to the land.

NaturePlus™ Credits

Biodiversity may well be the single most important aspect of a healthy planet. Everything, from the air we breathe and the food we eat, to the economy at large, relies on a great variety of plants, animals and microorganisms working in tandem to keep ecosystems in balance. 

It’s no surprise, then, that businesses are beginning to take biodiversity loss seriously. By investing in programs that protect natural habitats and strengthen biodiversity, companies can help ward off catastrophe, while simultaneously assuring investors and stakeholders that they’re addressing one of the largest environmental challenges facing the planet.

And we’re not talking about protecting a piece of forest over here so you can clear one over there. NaturePlus™ Credits are focused on additionality with a view to achieving ‘Nature Positive’ outcomes that will see ecological systems improving and rebuilding by 2030.

While most payments for biodiversity outcomes are based on actions that are carried out with a view to improving biodiversity in the future, NaturePlus™ Credits are only awarded to projects that have already delivered third-party audited and certified improvement in environmental condition. This means investment in NaturePlus™ Credits represents positive outcomes for nature. 

GreenCollar is running 20 NaturePlus™ pilot projects in Australia with a view to valuing and rewarding adaptive land management that delivers benefits for native ecosystems and species. The first credits are expected to come to market in early 2023.

Environmental markets: the way forward

According to a 2021 report by the UN Environment Programme, over AU$11 trillion worth of investments need to be made in nature-based projects by 2050 if the planet is to come out the other side of the interlinked climate, biodiversity and land degradation crises it currently faces. 

That sounds like a lot of money – and for any individual, it is. But with robust, science-backed environmental markets working to make investment in the environment that much smoother and more rewarding for companies, it’s not only an achievable goal, but a desirable one. 

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The plight of the koala, while swift, was not entirely unexpected. Koala populations on Australia’s east coast have been steadily declining since the late 1800s fur trade. In more recent years, they have been impacted by urban expansion and habitat destruction. It’s now estimated that 71% of koala habitat has been destroyed and just 32,000 – 58,000 koala now exist in the wild.

While changing the listing of koala to ‘endangered’ offers some protection, the critical challenge now is urgent restoration of habitat to support immediate survival and future regeneration of the koala.

The Solution – Koala Population and Habitat Method

GreenCollar recognises that existing funding models, relying on government grants and philanthropic investment, are insufficient to support the level of conservation needed to address this extinction crisis. Which is why our research and development team partnered with Worldwide Fund for Nature Australia and Queensland Trust for Nature to develop the Koala Population and Habitat Method.

The method, openly published for use in March 2022, enables koala population and habitat condition to be measured and reported under a scientifically rigorous and practical methodology. This allows efforts to reverse the decline in koala to be measured, benchmarked and tracked using a standardised condition score.

Changes in condition score provide visibility over outcomes, which increases confidence that real results are being achieved and enables investment to be channelled to projects that demonstrate measurable benefits for koala habitat and populations.

How it works

Using the widely respected Accounting for Nature Framework to assess environmental condition, the method measures two important indicators for the health of koala populations:

1) koala activity, presence and distribution and

2) habitat quality – a combination of extent and connectivity or core habitat, evaluation of threats that exist within habitat, food tree availability and forest structure.

The method targets Queensland and northern New South Wales where koala have shown sharpest decline and complements local government area guides to preferred food trees and state-based vegetation assessments. To be included, areas need to be greater than 100 hectares, or form a connected area of greater than 100 hectares within the same bioregion.

The method uses commonly applied scat survey techniques including monitoring defecation, animal scratching, footprints and food remains, to determine presence of koala, and benchmarks this against ideal population activity in each ecosystem.

Guiding informed decisions to protect koala

Ultimately, the Koala Population and Habitat Method can be used to inform a range of decisions when it comes to land management and investment including;

• Identifying areas for improvement in land and habitat management, such as managing invasive species that impede movement of koala through the landscape
• Identifying healthy koala populations within a landscape and identifying areas of focus for conservation actions
• Tracking conservation efforts over time to provide confidence that genuine positive outcomes are being achieved as a result of investment

The Koala Population and Habitat Method is just one of the tools required to save this iconic species, and GreenCollar is proud to have played a part in bringing it to fruition.

Access the full method on the Accounting for Nature website here.

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